Monday, December 15, 2008

Migrating NSLU to bigger capacity Harddisk

Finally, i have managed to migrate all my data from my old hard drive (320 GB) used for my NSLU (unslung) to a bigger hard drive (500GB).

The old hard drive is starting to give me problems. For the past two power down of my NSLU, the old hard drive did not start up properly. I have to leave it running for a couple of days before finally, NSLU can boot from it. Fearing for my data in it. I got an external USB raid enclosure for 2 500GB HDD. The challenge is to migrate it smoothly.

Went to google about it. But did not have a solution that meet my needs. Finally, i was introduced to Clonezilla and GParted. These 2 application made the migration a breeze!
First download the live CD for Clonezilla and GParted. Burn the iso images into 2 CD.

Boot using GParted CD. Attached your USB drive from NSLU and the New harddrive into the computer you are booting from. Check the original partition in your old hard drive.

1. Using GParted, create the SAME number of partition on the new disk as in the old disk
- In my old hard disk, i have 3 partition. (One big ext3, one ext3 of about 120MB and one linux swap partition)
- I created 3 partition in the new disk. (1 linux swap partition, one 150MB ext3 partition, the rest of 500GB goes into the 2nd ext3 partition)

2. Once the partition are created in the new hard drive successfully, Shutdown. Change CD to Clonezilla and boot using Clonezilla CD

3. Using Clonezilla CD. Follow the on screen instructions till you reach the step where you can choose "device-device"

4. Then choose partition to partition. NOTE: When given the option, DO NOT set the target partition as the same as the source partition. If you choose to set target partition to be the same as source partition, you will end up having the same partition structure in your old disk (in my case is only 320GB, the other 180GB "went missing"). Choose to grow partition to the target partition size.

5. Repeat the partition cloning for ALL the partition in your old drive you your new drive.

After you have finish everything, Just plug in your new drive into your NSLU. You will have all your setting and all your data as what you have in your old hard drive, with the new capacity of your new drive.

Asian Parenting